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 News from Around the Americas | July 2006 
Texas Investigates Gunfire on Border
 Lynn Brezosky - Associated Press
| | Spc. Timmothy Pike, right, of Marion, Va., listens to an instructor after being gagged and subdued during a training exercise for the Virginia National Guard volunteers who are being deployed to the Arizona border with Mexico at Ft. Pickett in Blackstone, Va., Tuesday, July 11, 2006. Over 400 guardsman will deploy to the border from the end of July to September. (AP/Steve Helber) |
Authorities were investigating Thursday whether Mexican gunmen who fired on deputies and Border Patrol agents from across the Rio Grande had crossed into the U.S.
Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino said 200 to 300 shots were fired from automatic weapons Wednesday night, but no one was injured on the U.S. side and police didn't fire back.
"This type of incident is a very good example of why I will not allow my deputies to patrol the river banks or the levees anywhere close to the river," he said. "We do have drug trafficking gangs, human trafficking gangs, that will not hesitate to fire at us."
Trevino said the shooting appeared to have started in Mexico, at a riverside ranch owned by a family from Donna, Texas. He said two brothers said they were with their father at the ranch when vehicles full of armed men drove in and opened fire, killing a ranch hand and taking their father hostage.
The brothers hid for several hours in a field before swimming across the river. They called their mother from a cell phone, who called 911. The mother said someone may have been killed, and police and the Border Patrol initially went to the river bank to search for a body. Once there, the gunfire began.
"There is no doubt about one thing, that we were shot at from the Mexican side," Trevino said. The barrage "lasted over five minutes, maybe even seven."
He said deputies didn't shoot back because they couldn't see the assailants through the trees on the other side.
Thursday, a SWAT team finished securing the area.
Trevino said Mexican police were conducting their own investigation but had not yet been in contact. He said he believed the chances of finding and prosecuting the gunmen were "next to impossible."
He said it was too early to determine a motive, but theories were that a drug gang was trying to get control of a ranch adjacent to the river or that gang members thought there were drugs on the ranch to steal.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics indicate violence on the border has escalated.
In the Rio Grande Valley sector alone, there have so far been 76 reports of violence against Border Patrol agents since the start of the fiscal year Oct. 1, including shootings, physical assaults, vehicle assaults, threats and rock throwings. There were 35 in 2005.
Border-wide, there were 566 assaults against agents for fiscal year 2005, compared with 548 in 2004 and 375 in 2003.
Border Patrol spokesman Roy Cervantes said most of the violence was a result of increasing enforcement making smugglers more desperate. |
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